


The Mohs Test

by Sheffield



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-25 01:13:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bugg is back, but this time he has subcontractors</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mohs Test

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my excellent beta-reader Techgrrl, who betaed the first half of this story. All the remaining mistakes are my own.

One

They were painting the hall, and he wrinkled his nose in disgust as he juggled with his keys and the bag of groceries. Damned landlords, they were supposed to give notice when they arranged work to the common parts of the building. As he kicked the loft door closed behind him, he was so busy dialling down his sense of smell and rubbing the bridge of his nose to soothe his abused sinuses that he missed the white noise generator altogether. The first he realised something was wrong was when the barrel of the gun touched the side of his neck, and Lionel Bugg's voice said,

"I hate to be melodramatic but, well, freeze."

Seeing no immediate alternative that didn't involve someone having to clean his brains off the wall, he froze.

"Gun? Two fingered, very gently, yadda yadda?"

He put down the groceries and, two fingered, very gently, yadda yadda, handed over his piece.

"What do you want this time, Bugg?"

"Over to the couch - slowly, that's it. Sit. Cuffs on, I think, don't you? Safer for both of us."

Sitting down, on the low upholstered couch, he was in a bad position to move but he wasn’t going to cuff himself unless he had to...

He saw the slight opening, did that old move he’d learned in Ranger 101, and watched it go down perfectly. Bugg's gun flew across the room and Jim ended up kneeling on Bugg's legs, his arm round the guy's windpipe. With great satisfaction, he intoned,

"Lionel Bugg, I’m arresting you for kidnapping, assault, and attempted assault on a police officer. You have the right to remain silent..."

Bugg used the half lung-full of air he allowed him to wheeze, "S'nd-burg... ‘pute..."

The magic word was Sandburg. He allowed Bugg to breathe some more.

"Sandburg... if you want him to live you'll re-consider. Check the computer..."

He re-applied his favourite choke-hold.

"Where's Sandburg?"

Bugg wheezed, "check...'pute..." and Jim cuffed him in disgust. Blair's laptop, its modem plugged in, was all set up on the table. The screensaver was on, and he pressed the spacebar.

The screen cleared, and there was Blair. It was a warehouse: a vast, derelict, open space; and in the middle of it someone had built a cage, about eight feet square, and inside the cage was Blair. Blair was lying down, apparently asleep or unconscious, although it wasn't hard to see the movement of his chest that proved he was breathing. He was wearing the jeans, shirt and vest he’d been wearing that morning, but his coat, shoes, belt, watch and jewellery were gone, even to the silver clasp he’d been using to tie back his hair. There were four pictures of him, the screen split to show him from four different angles.

"What is this?" Jim snarled at Bugg. His prisoner allowed himself a small smile.

"I’m using some very reliable subcontractors. I’ve used them before; we work well together. I knew you were more adept at this physical stuff than I am, Detective, but it doesn’t matter. You can take me in, interrogate me, do whatever you like. But I don’t know where they’re keeping him, and I have no way of contacting them. Your little friend is perfectly safe, for now. I paid extra for the kidnapping to be non-violent. He was picked up at the university, drugged, and placed where you see him. I specified my subcontractors were to be masked at all times in contact with him and that he was to be unharmed and treated with the utmost respect. For now."

They always strut, Jim thought, unable to absorb the meaning of the chilling words being uttered in those quiet, conversational tones.

"In the next twenty four hours you will help me with some work I have in hand, and the successful completion of the first stage will signal my associates that he is to continue to be well treated. When the job is completed, my subcontractors will walk away and phone in his location. If, however, we fail to complete any of the stages of the task in hand, an escalating scale of reprisals will be applied to Mr. Sandburg. First strike and he’ll be roughed up; nothing too serious. They’ll slap him around a little. He’ll be scared, and hurt, but nothing he can’t live with. Second strike, and it’ll be a little more serious. A black eye, a bloody nose, a split lip. Won’t be so pretty for a while, but he’ll still be fundamentally okay. Third strike and it starts to get ugly. Broken bones now; an arm or leg, their choice. I suggested they offer Mr. Sandburg the choice, in fact. Give him something to occupy his mind, while he’s waiting."

He paused, expecting a response, while Jim fought down the simple, primal urge to snap his neck and silence him for good.

"Fourth strike, he’ll be raped. Believe me, my subcontractors - and there are several of them - are really hoping you’re resistant enough for them to get to stage four."

There had to be something he could say, something he could do, to stop this. The urge to obliterate Bugg, to stop that smug, gloating voice, was becoming overwhelming.

"And, frankly, you don’t want to know what would happen to him if we missed another stage marker after that. Now, let me out of these cuffs like a good boy and let’s get started."

Jim’s face was granite as he picked up the phone.

"Simon? I’m coming in with a prisoner. I’ve got Lionel Bugg under arrest. He broke into my place and pulled a gun on me. Yeah, well, you know. Listen, Simon, there’s a problem. You need to get a forensics team to my place stat: get Serena and any other computer wiz you can find in on it too. Sandburg’s laptop’s on my coffee table, and I want it bagged tagged and taken apart. Bugg has just shown me some computer pictures of Blair - says his friends have got the kid. Yeah." He eyed Bugg balefully while he listened to his captain.

"Yes, I know. Trust me. He’ll be in booking in ten minutes without a scratch on him."

"You’re making a mistake."

"You’re the one making a mistake, Bugg. You find a way. Sandburg walks in here, and you walk out. That’s the only deal on offer. Otherwise... you go to jail. And this time, I’ll take you in myself. No mistakes."

Bugg seemed to relax, leaned back on cuffed hands.

"Well that’s fine. Take a last look at your little friend. He won’t look so pretty when you find his body."

There was something familiar about that warehouse. Or was there? Was it just generic "warehouse", like every place they chased down every crook in Cascade? Sometimes it felt as if his whole career took place on a back lot in some TV studio. No; there was something... looking past Blair, over the cage, towards the back of the cavernous space. Was that a window? He focused his sight...

...deeper, deeper...

...but it didn’t resolve into a picture but into pixels. The closer he looked, the less he saw, the window dissolving into a pattern of coloured dots, each dot a colour, vivid, regimented, clear; there was no answer there but only pigment, spinning spots of colour, blue, yellow, red...

* * *

 

What? Where? Wh-

Uh-ho. Bad guys. He dimly remembered pulling up outside the university, someone tapping on his window, a puff of something sprayed in his face...

Drugged and kidnapped. Not good. Sooooo not good.

He stood up, swaying a little with the after effects of whatever they'd used to knock him out. His feet were cold - hmmm. Socks but no shoes. What's that about? He searched himself grimly, coming up with exactly... nada. Not a comb, not a handkerchief, not a stick of gum. Nothing hard, or pointed, or solid. Not so much as a coin or a bead. Even the decorative carved bone buttons on his vest had been cut off. He supposed he ought to be grateful he hadn't been wearing button-fly jeans.

He was in a cage inside an otherwise empty warehouse. He leaned heavily on the bars. No movement. They were set in concrete so he wasn’t going to budge them, and the bars that formed the cage’s ceiling were welded in place. The door was well made too, no hint of movement between the frame and the rest of the bars, and there was a metal plate next to the keep of the lock. Probably a padlock on the outside, but no way he was going to get fingers around the metal plate to reach it, even if he’d had anything he could have used to pick the lock.

There was a rolled-up futon to sit or lie on, a bucket with a lid for, well, he didn’t want to think about that, and a cardboard box of groceries. He looked at his supplies. A six-pack of bottled water, still in its shrink wrap. Some packs of chips and nachos and the like, and some dried fruit. Nothing that needed utensils to eat, or that came in anything solid. His only option that might serve as some kind of weapon was a plastic bottle of water used as a club. He smiled briefly at the thought of himself as some kind of ninja warrior, defending himself with a rain of nachos followed up by a killing blow with a water bottle. Maybe they’d kidnapped the wrong partner.

He heard a door opening. Somewhere in the gloomy depths of his prison he heard footsteps but the floodlights illuminating his little cube of captivity were too bright for him to see anything much outside of their beams. So he waited, nervously, and there they were. Three of them. They wore ski masks over their faces and they stood outside the cage looking in.

"Mr. Sandburg," one of them said pleasantly, "I hope you’re not too uncomfortable. If there’s anything we can do to make this experience less unpleasant, please let us know. We’ll be looking in on you from time to time so if anything occurs to you, please feel free to mention it. We can’t offer you anything not on our approved list, but if you’d like someone to fetch fast food, or make you a hot drink, you have only to ask."

"Thank you," he said gravely. Politeness to kidnappers never hurts, and he was both thirsty and wanted to prolong the conversation if he could.

"Could I have some hot tea?"

"Of course." One of them turned to go.

"Can I ask what all this is about?"

"Nothing for you to worry about. Detective Ellison is assisting our employer and so long as he carries on working at the relationship you have nothing to fear."

"And if he doesn’t?"

"Well now: let’s not worry about that till it happens."

* * *

What? Where? Wh-

He was in a van. Lying, awkwardly, across some lumps and bumps that were covered in a tarp that smelled of grease and motor oil and... His hands were cuffed behind him. And Lionel Bugg had just tipped icewater over his head...

"What happened?" he rasped out.

He tried to sit up, and found the extent of his freedom of movement when his wrists were tugged. He looked back, and saw that the cuffs on his wrists were attached to a short chain that was bolted and then welded onto the floor of the van. He flushed in shame. He had zoned. Zoned on the computer screen, stood there like a piece of furniture while Bugg turned the situation around on him. How the hell had Bugg got him down the stairs and into a van? He could almost hear Blair’s voice in his head, gleefully demanding they test this new phenomenon, his furniture impressions. What could happen, what could be done to him, while he was zoned, without bringing him out of it?

"This time you've gone too far, Bugg; this time I'm going to kill you unless you let me and Sandburg go, right now."

"That's just talk, Jim. You know you love it. Am I right, or am I right? Secretly you _want_ to do this; you're dying here, hardly making use of your senses at all."

Bugg clambered into the drivers seat and Jim tried desperately to sit up at an angle where he could see where he was to be taken.

"Blair is so... so vanilla. He's all 'what can you hear, what can you see'. Finding fingerprints and hairs forensic have missed, big deal. That's their job! The universe has dropped these extraordinary gifts into your lap and you use them to clean up after people too incompetent to do their own jobs. But tell me, when did you last feel as alive as you did working for me, hmm?"

Just words, like an insect buzzing in the corner of the room, that you long to swat.

"So I've put Mr. Vanilla out of the way, where his annoying whine can't distract you, and I’ve arranged it you don't have to feel guilty about what you're going to do. But, really, it'll be fun! Relax and go with it."

"That’s a bunch of crap, Bugg. You’re the only one enjoying himself around here. Get off on this stuff, do you? Is this how you get your kicks, hmm?"

It was a feeble riposte, at best, and Jim almost felt he deserved it when Bugg turned around and silenced him with a clumsy backhanded blow. He turned his head to wipe the blood off of his split lip onto his jacket shoulder and managed an insolent smile at his captor.

"Keep it coming, Bugg, if it makes you feel good. Or do I mean, keep it up?"

Bugg’s face went an interesting colour but then he breathed deeply, into the diaphragm, and breathed it out, slowly, in a sigh. He turned back around, started up the van and drove off.

"Why are you trying to make me mad, Ellison? Do you think if I get angry enough to kill you that I’ll then feel remorseful enough to let Sandburg go? I don’t think so. Just concentrate on getting your senses working at full power: we’ll be there in a minute and the only way Sandburg stays in one piece is for you to be a good little boy and do as you’re told."

Jim was possessed by a perverse desire to wind Bugg up as far as he would go. He stretched out as well as he could in the confines of the van and crossed his ankles lazily.

"Whatever you say, Lionel. Oh, and, hey, how’s your stomach?" he drawled insolently. Bugg visibly took a deep breath and counted to ten.

"Don’t be more stupid than you look, Ellison. That little mojo wore off after a couple of weeks. But I’m sure Sandburg will find payback’s a bitch."

And he looked over his shoulder and grinned at his captive. Like a shark.

It was one of those built-to-order factory/workshop complexes, where all the buildings look like scaled-up versions of those Lego houses you used to build when you were a kid. The van threaded its way between the buildings and Bugg parked it, hidden from the road, in a reserved parking space between two of the units. Jim extended his hearing, as well as he could, but came up empty. He wasn’t sure whether there was no-one around, or he just couldn’t hear them if they were.

Bugg unlocked the chain on his cuffs.

"Get out."

Jim jumped down awkwardly with his hands cuffed behind him, and waited.

"Over there."

A building like any of the others. The nameplate read "Mohs Industries".

"What happened to Larry and Curly?" he asked sardonically.

Bugg unlocked the door and disarmed an obvious alarm system with a quick snick of a switch. In his grey suit Bugg looked like an accountant or a bookie’s runner, inconspicuously ordinary; short, mousey, timid and middle aged. Maybe he should have been the cop and Jim - jeans and leather jacket, cuffs and a fat lip - the perp. Jim looked around at the security cameras, made sure they had a good look at his face and then turned around for good measure so that they had an equally good record of the fact that he had his hands cuffed behind his back.

"Don’t be a fool, Ellison. Get over here."

Bugg took some thin surgical gloves out of his pocket and put them on.

"In here."

He unlocked a door with gloved hands and then ushered Jim into a room. Just a room: no furniture, no windows, nothing but four walls and a strip of neon lighting.

"What do you hear?"

"Your irritating voice."

Bugg hit him again, and this time he was ready for it; he rode the blow, kicking Bugg's feet out from under him as he fell. Jim went down on his back on the floor, curled his spine and rolled his butt elegantly through the hoop of his bound hands, back flipped and was up on his feet with his hands now cuffed in front of him while Bugg was still scrambling to his feet. Kick - once, into the gut, that kicking the gun out of the hand thing is strictly television. Strike - carefully, measuring the force, holding back the killing blow. And Bugg was on the ground and the gun was safely in Jim’s pocket and he was searching Bugg for the handcuff key.

"Sandburg will suffer for this."

There was no answer to that. He hoped Blair would forgive him.

 

Two

"I don’t know!"

Jim pushed him back under water, waited a long, careful moment, and then hauled his head up by the hair.

"Aaaaah!" The sound of Bugg desperately struggling to suck in air was music to Jim’s ears.

"Where is he?"

"I don’t know."

Jim pushed Bugg’s head back into the sink. It had only taken him a moment to determine there was no-one else in the Mohs building and he had quickly cuffed Bugg, dragged him into the men's room, filled one of the sinks and pushed his face down into it. He didn’t have time to be subtle. Bugg had Blair, but Jim had Bugg. Stalemate.

He hauled his face out of the water again.

"Where is he?"

"I don’t...aaaaaaah.... know. Please! I don’t know! I told you. I knew you could get the drop on me. I don’t know where they’ve taken him, and I didn’t want to know, and I don’t have any way to contact them, and if you kill me you kill Blair."

It was the truth, Bugg was too desperate to lie. Disgusted, he let Bugg fall to the ground and stood there a moment, looking at his own face in the mirror. He didn’t like what he saw. The industrial spy was a broken man. You did that, Ellison. Feel good? Crap. He needed to find Blair.

Or a phone.

"Simon? Jim. I’m at the Mohs building out on the industrial estate over by Fourth Street. Yea, I know, but he turned things around on me for a while. But it’s under control now. Yes, the laptop’s with us."

Jim glanced over at Bugg and then quickly looked away.

The man was still smiling.

* * *

Rafe's friends didn't get to hear this tone in his voice. But then Bugg wasn't exactly a friend.

"What time is the first stage marker? When does Blair get beaten up?"

"I’d like to see my lawyer now."

"Your lawyer? Listen to me, friend, your only chance of walking out of here is to tell us everything you know, right now."

"I’d like to see my lawyer now. Please."

"You want me to leave? Call Ellison in here, leave you with him? Because, you know, I can do that. And you can give your ‘lawyer’ crap to him, see how he reacts to it."

"I’d really like to see my lawyer. Now."

Rafe’s hands were in Bugg’s lapels and Bugg was dangling, toes inches off the ground, hands cuffed behind him, but that infuriating smile hadn’t faltered.

"Listen to me, punk, Blair Sandburg is a good friend of mine, and if anything happens to him your life won’t be worth that"

Rafe snapped his fingers dismissively, allowing Bugg to fall back to the hard wooden interrogation-room chair.

"So start talking, and start talking now."

"But I have been talking, Detective. I’ve asked to see my lawyer, several times."

"-and, as I’m sure you’re aware, Detective, it’s unconstitutional to continue to interrogate a prisoner without legal counsel if the prisoner asks for legal counsel to be present"

Rafe looked up at Simon and the other new arrival. Uh ho.

"OK, Rafe, Mr. Bugg’s attorney is here now. Let’s leave them alone."

"Thank you Captain. That would be helpful. Oh, and I assume the room beyond the glass will be cleared?"

Simon sighed.

"I’m on it."

***

The men and women of Major Crimes assembled in the bullpen. One of their own was missing, and with a high-ticket attorney standing between them and the one responsible, they were left working the case from scratch.

"What have we got, people?"

"It’s a webcam running through a couple of remailer and anonymiser sites so it’s taking a while to get a trace on the source, and even when we get to the ISP they’re using they will most likely have set up a dummy corporation, used false names... it’s going to take a while to trace the people behind it."

"And even if we get to the names of the people Bugg hired, that still won’t tell us where they are, or where they’ve stashed Sandburg."

"And we don’t even know how long we’ve got."

"Jim?"

Simon listened to the hubbub of voices and then turned to his best detective. But Jim wasn’t with them, not in spirit anyway. He wasn’t - what did Sandburg call it? - zoned, not exactly, but he was sitting there staring at one of the computer screens set up around the room. They had logged into the webcam site from a number of machines but they were no closer to deducing where Blair was being held.

Jim was staring at the screen. There was no sound - they had checked - and the picture was grainy, poor quality, updating once or twice a second so that it had a disjointed, surreal quality. But every time Simon had glanced at it before, Blair had been alone.

Now they were coming for him, and Major Crimes’ time had just run out.

They were masked, anonymous figures, five of them. Their shapes were disguised with bulky jackets, their faces with ski masks. They unlocked the cage and gestured Sandburg out. He was obviously talking, and the men and women of Major Crimes found themselves imagining the sound of their young Observer’s voice. Usually he could talk himself out of pretty much anything but this...

Two of them slammed him up against the bars of the cage and held him there. He said something; some kind of taunt, evidently, because another of the masked men took him by the jaw, squeezing till he shut his mouth.

Then they started slapping his face.

That was all.

Slapping his face, back and forth, one after another, rocking his head from side to side. It was obviously humiliating, and painful, and disorientating. And all they could do was stand there and watch Blair take it. After a full minute of bitch-slapping they stopped, and Blair slid slowly down to the ground. And they hauled him back to his feet, pushed him back inside the cage, and slammed the door.

***

Well that was... weird, mainly. They'd taken him out of the cage, slapped him around a bit, and then put him back. And then it was back to super-polite "anything I can get for you Mr. Sandburg" again, as if nothing had happened. But then why had they slapped him around? He hadn't done anything, there hadn't been any kind of "this is what happens if you do [x]" message attached. And it didn't seem to be for fun, there wasn't any hint of sadistic enjoyment in their actions.

But if they were slapping him around to motivate Jim, well, where was Jim? Was it a Sentinel thing? Did they have Jim stashed away somewhere in the building? Were they testing his ability to hear what they were doing to his partner? He went cold at the thought. A test or a trap? Slap Blair around till Jim told them to stop... and incidentally prove he could hear his Guide a room, a building, maybe even a block away.

OK, reasonable working hypothesis, he thought - hit me and Jim bleeds. So his job was to convey to his partner that it was OK, without giving away that he knew he could be heard. Standing up and announcing, Jim, it's OK, I'm not hurt, would be as stupid as standing up and announcing hey, look, I found a Sentinel. And Naomi Sandburg didn't raise any stupid children...

***

"Megan?"

"What do you need, Jim?"

She followed him into Simon’s office and found Simon there already.

"OK, there’s only the three of us know why Bugg targeted me. Rafe and Serena are heading up a team looking into the webcam thing, and Joel is organising the foot soldiers slogging round every abandoned warehouse in Cascade. Basically the ordinary police work is covered. But we three are the only ones who can follow up the other thing."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Mohs. Bugg hadn’t asked me to do anything except focus my hearing when I jumped him."

Simon and Megan were still looking at him, uncomprehending.

"So what did he want me to hear? There are at least four or five stages to whatever he had planned. What happened or didn’t happen to get Blair beaten? What’s going to trigger the next phase... or the one after that..."

"I’m on it," Megan said at once. "Do you want to come too?"

"No... if you’ll do the legwork at Mohs, Megan, I want to stay here and try something..."

Simon frowned as Megan left.

"There’s nothing there, Jim. It’s a digital picture, not real life. If you were there, in the warehouse, maybe you could use your sight to see through the window behind Blair and identify where he is. But you said the last time you tried you zoned and Bugg trapped you. What makes you think it will be any different this time?"

"I don’t know, Simon. But at least this time I’ll be ready for it. And I HAVE to try something, you know that. The next time they’re going to really beat him. And then after that they’ll break an arm or a leg. Imagine what that will mean to him. He could be out of action for months, maybe permanently if we don't get to him fast enough."

"I'm not sure this is the only way, Jim. Standard operating procedure would be for you to go along with what Bugg asks, at least until he asks you to do something illegal."

"You weren't there, Simon. When he was telling me what was going to go down, his heartbeat was as steady as a rock. He'd practised that speech till he could say it all without a shred of emotion."

Simon nodded understanding. "Like people who can beat lie detectors."

"Exactly - so where was he lying? I don't think he means Blair to get out of this alive whatever I do, whether I co-operate or not. I think Sandburg’s only chance is for us to find him first."

"I’m sorry Jim but I disagree. I want you to go along with Bugg a while longer. Talk to him, talk to his lawyer, see if you can buy us some more time."

"Simon, we don't HAVE any time! Bugg isn't in control of the game any more. Whatever set off the beating didn't come from Bugg; we have to find Blair before whatever goes down next, goes down. Don't you get it? Bugg *wants* me in there bouncing off his lawyer, and not outside looking for Sandburg."

"All right, detective -" Simon stressed the title just enough to remind them both who was supposed to be in charge, "I hear what you say but I think we need more time. I want you in that interrogation room, right now, making nice with Mr. Bugg and his lawyer. You will not, I repeat, not, lay a hand on either of them. You will offer them refreshments. You will offer them anything they want, up to and including the mayor's firstborn child, if it will buy us some time. Do I make myself clear?"

"Sir, yes sir."

Blank, closed, hard-eyed; Jim Ellison had gone, and in his place stood a robot, the perfect soldier. Simon Banks sighed.

Someone had to make the decision. Jim couldn't be everywhere at once. At least now, if it went bad, Jim would be able to tell himself it was all Simon's fault. It was all he could do, for either of his friends.

* * *

Tea. More tea. What do we conclude from that? Well... they kept offering him tea and not coffee. They knew enough about him to know his habits?

Yes, he could live with that. What else did they know? They had known where to find him, at the university. Check. They knew holding him would put pressure on Jim. Check. And what do we conclude from that? Gee, Socrates, what? Well, Socrates, he told himself firmly, we conclude that they *want* to put pressure on Jim. Pressure to do something. Ordinary criminals wanting to put pressure on a cop, or something else, something Sentinel-related? Hmmmm. Good question. Testable hypothesis? He rattled it around in his brain a while.

Must have left his brains at home.

"Hey?"

"Mr. Sandburg?"

"What’s the programme?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know. What’s your plan? You got a timetable? What? Come on, man, you’re the bad guy, right? Don’t you watch TV? The bad guy *always* explains his plans to the hostage..."

The man in the ski mask laughed. Way to go, Sandburg; hostage 101 is proud of its graduates. He might not have learned a damn thing about their plans for him, but, after all, the more you make them laugh, make them like you, the less likely they are to put a bullet through the back of your head.

Three

"How’s he doing?" Simon had decided it was disrupting the work of looking for Sandburg if everyone in the building was keeping an eye on him via the webcams all the time. They had turned off all the monitors except one in the corner of the bullpen, plus the one in the interview room which Serena had set up to record. Rhonda had worked out a rota so that everyone got their specific half hour of Sandburg-sitting, as well as the odd glances they all kept giving towards the monitor, as if by watching Blair they were supporting him. The formal watch meant they could all relax a little, feel as if the situation was covered, as if Blair were a sick friend in hospital who they didn’t want to wake up alone. It was, however, only proper that Simon had Captain’s privileges which enabled him to look in on either monitor whenever he wanted: which was lucky, given he had developed a neurotic need to check in with the person on webcam watch every few minutes.

"He’s OK."

"Yeah, but what’s he *doing*?"

Both men watched the monitor in companionable silence for a moment. Blair had got to his feet and moved to the middle of his cage and was now rising onto the toe of one foot and then the other, gently swinging his arms from side to side.

"Keeping warm?" Henri suggested. Blair was finding the rhythm of it now, working each foot up and down, cautious with only socks for traction on the slippery concrete floor.

"Keeping warm, I guess so." Simon said, considering. It certainly looked like Sandburg was marching on the spot except he wasn’t actually lifting his feet off the ground at all. It reminded him... yeah, that was it.

"It’s a physiotherapy exercise. It’s one of the ones they showed Darryl, after he threw his knee out - working all the muscles without straining any of them." They watched, as Sandburg, emboldened, started moving around his cage more vigorously, making full use of the limited space he had, swinging his arms and bouncing on the balls of his feet. They’d taken the kid’s jacket, he didn’t have a sweater, and it didn’t look like there was any heat. Then Simon realised the new object in the picture might be a radio, because Sandburg’s movements were developing into a kind of dance, as if it was playing something funky and he was keeping himself warm by dancing along.

"Sandburg always did move to the beat of his own drum," Simon said fondly, and then, remembering to be stern, "Ahem. Well, keep your eyes open, H, and let me know if anything changes."

Henri’s eyes had never strayed from the screen during the conversation, Simon noted with approval. Sandburg was dancing in earnest now, shaking his booty and stamping his feet, swinging his arms like a wild thing. They watched for a moment or two as the music changed and Sandburg flung his arms above his head, then curled his hands back down, and then leaned over with one arm flung up and one flung out...

"Way to keep warm, Sandburg," Simon said softly. And then, realising what he was seeing, "Rhonda! Get on the phone. Call every radio station in Cascade and then work outwards till you find the one that had this on its playlist at 14.05."

"Had what on its playlist?"

And Simon’s capable administrative assistant was reduced to speechlessness as she watched Simon Banks and Henri Brown simultaneously mimic the actions Blair Sandburg was performing on the webcam site.

Only Simon and Henri were singing along as they raised their hands over their heads...

"Y. M. C. A..."

And thank heavens for the Village People.

***

"There’s nothing there, Jim. Nothing."

"There has to be."

"No - the unit Bugg took you to has been rented for six months, by someone who paid cash. The Mohs corporation is a front, but there’s no-one, nothing, behind it that I can find. They don’t make anything, they don’t do anything. They don’t have any staff, they don’t have any directors except another shell company, and no-one on the entire industrial park remembers ever seeing anyone go in and out of the building. The mailman hasn’t delivered anything except circulars. You and Bugg seem to be the only people who have ever stepped across the threshold."

The Australian inspector’s eyes were dark with frustration and she paced the room like a caged tiger.

"So it must be a front for Bugg - he must be Mohs. And the building must be rented as a base for something else..."

"Don't you think I thought of that? I may not be a sentinel, but that doesn't mean I'm an idiot. Sandy gave me some stuff to read, his journals, notes, so I have a pretty good idea of your range. That would take in the whole of the industrial park and I'm telling you there's nothing there! A catering firm. A printing works. An electrical repair shop. A computer consultancy. A cheese warehouse. A mad inventor who is trying to manufacture his patented in-car VCR! Nothing!"

"We're wasting time," Jim paced the corridor outside the interview room like a caged tiger, "time Sandburg doesn't have."

"Maybe..." Connor said slowly, "...maybe that's the idea."

***

"Tell me, Detective Ellison," Bugg said, still smiling, "how does it feel?"

"How does what feel?"

"Knowing you have sentenced your friend to death."

The lawyer stirred but Bugg waved him to silence and sat back, regarding Jim steadily, letting the silence grow. Jim gave him the cop stare back, level, unblinking, unmoved.

The moment stretched and neither of them moved, the lawyer looking unhappily from one to the other, until finally Bugg blinked, deliberately, and looked away, yawned lazily.

"Gerald, I think we’re done here," he said, precise and formal, starting to get to his feet. Jim moved into his space and stared him down, resisting the urge to hurl him back into the chair and contenting himself with a growl of, "Bugg, you and I haven’t even begun..."

"Detective Ellison, what precisely is my client charged with?"

Jim shook his head, as if the lawyer was a fly he could shake off.

"Assault, kidnapping, and attempted assault on a police officer."

"That’s a crock and you know it. You can’t make any of those stick. Now would you like to let Mr. Bugg leave now, or after I get a court order - and, incidentally, make a phone call to IA about your outrageous assault on my client after he was arrested but before you called it in."

It was all slipping away from him.

"Bugg-" Jim ignored the lawyer and went straight to the source, "whatever it is you wanted..."

"Yes, detective?"

Could he say it? Would he beg, if it would save Blair’s life?

"I’ve changed my mind."

"You have? What, about assisting me?"

"Whatever you want. Whatever it takes."

The lawyer was on his feet already, but Jim and Bugg were eyeball to eyeball. The lawyer seemed oblivious to the agenda going on between them, waiting patiently, briefcase in hand, for his client.

"You can leave, right now." Jim waved an arm towards the door.

"And you’ll escort me?"

"Wherever you want to go."

"And... assist me in my... endeavours?"

"Whatever it takes. Just make it stop."

Bugg leaned back.

"Interesting."

The smooth voice of the lawyer interjected. "I strongly advise you against making any deals - we’ve got enough for you to leave here anyway, not to mention enough to bring charges against Detective Ellison any time you want..."

"I think you can go, Gerald. I think Detective Ellison and I will take a little walk together...

"But there’s no need to let..."

"Goodbye, Gerald. I’ll be in touch. Detective Ellison..." Bugg’s smile was as wide as his face, encompassing the world. "Shall we?"

***

There was paperwork to do first. Simon, at least, had to be told. But as he walked across the bullpen towards Simon’s office Jim didn’t need to be a Sentinel to hear Joel’s heads up: "They’re back."

Horrified, the bullpen gathered around, fell silent and watched. Five men, masked, anonymous, silent, came towards the cage where Sandburg was being held. He looked nervously at them, seemed to say something. They pointed a gun at him, made him hold out his hands, cuffed his wrists together in front of him, reaching easily through the makeshift bars of his cage. Dammit, five on one and they still couldn’t play fair.

Not that there was anything "fair" about what was about to happen.

Once Blair was cuffed they opened up the cage and dragged him out, threw him up against the bars. Two of them held him, and another took him by a handful of hair, twisted his head up. There was some more talk - were they telling him about the cameras?

Maybe; in a typical Sandburg move he grinned across at one of the cameras and a slight flicker of...something... passed through the Major Crimes bullpen.

The first fist took Sandburg on the jaw and he would have fallen down if two of them hadn’t been holding him flat against the bars. One of them, without preliminary, punched his face, bouncing his head back against the bars and splitting his lip messily open. The observers winced in sympathy, stealing sympathetic glances at the stonefaced Ellison profile. Sandburg raised his bound hands to protect his face and another of them moved in, slammed his arms into the bars, above his head, and held him there, flat.

So now another one moved in, this time aiming for the stomach. But Sandburg was ready for it, aimed a wicked kick at the masked man that hit him exactly in the groin. The attacker doubled over in agony and many of the observers winced in almost-sympathy - the ones that weren’t giving each other high-fives and cheering.

"Go, Sandy," Megan cheered - but there were five of them, and Sandburg was alone at gunpoint with his wrists bound. They kicked him, and finally allowed him to fall to the ground, and then he was briefly hidden from view in a scrum of boots and fists.

As if at some hidden signal the movement stopped. The bullpen was as silent as the grave. And the five masked men leaned down, picked up the limp, long-haired figure, uncuffed him, and literally threw him through the air to land with a boneless crash on the floor of his cage.

And five masked men waved sardonically to the webcams, slammed the cage door shut, and walked out of shot.

And the crumpled figure lying on the cage floor never moved a muscle.

* * *

Ow.

Still alive, then.

Ow ow ow ow ow.

Some of the pieces still move, some of the time.

He got up from the floor, moving like an old man, and eased himself into a sitting position on the folded-up futon, remembering to wave an "I'm all right" acknowledgement at the watching cameras. Hell, Jim, he thought wearily, now would be a good time for heroic rescue #42, because Sidekick Boy isn't doing too well reading the plot over here. How had he got it so wrong? They weren't testing Jim's senses at all. They didn't have Jim - and that's a GOOD thing, right, he reminded himself sternly. But the name of the game was blackmail, not testing, and so it was up to him to escape or at least to find a way of not being used...

So escape... still no bright ideas in that direction, and a whole bunch of bruised (not broken, please not broken) ribs wasn't helping him think any clearer.

He stretched, warily, sternly forbidding any of his ribs to be even slightly cracked, and was reassured by the rudimentary obedience of all the working parts to some semblance of order. He took a deep, cleansing breath - he didn't have time for a concussion right now, thank you very much - and then froze.

Aha. Or eureka. Or something. Webcams. He was being watched, they'd said, taking great pleasure in letting him know it. And what entertainment was coming - no, not going to go there, he told himself sternly. So. Webcams. No sound, not continuous video, so lip reading wasn't really a proposition. But... had he ever told Jim about that wilderness camp Naomi had dumped him in, that summer when he was, what, nine, ten? The place where the flower child organiser had gone down with measles two days after he'd arrived and the second in command had turned out to be a Baden Powell enthusiast, so they'd had cold baths and route marches and campfire songs and by the time Naomi had picked him up he'd had badges sewn all the way up one arm of his tie-dye t-shirt and half way down the other...

...and he'd been as subversive and non-violent in his choice of badges to try out for as you could reasonably get, but actually he'd quite enjoyed the stamp collecting and the basketweaving and, of all the useless skills in his collection of useless skill, ta da! - semaphore.

And he started to chuckle quietly to himself, thinking of the famous Monty Python sketch of Heathcliffe and Cathy bounding towards each other over wuthering heights, semaphoring madly as they approached. Maybe not: no flags, and nothing to make them out of, unless he used empty Doritos packets. No; in that episode of Due South where Fraser and Inspector Thatcher semaphore absurdly from adjoining rooftops they'd managed perfectly well using their hands. It's the shape of the body, the silhouette of the arms, that forms the letters, not the flags you hold in your hand. Well, guys, he thought, I hope at least one of you did time as a boy scout because, dib dib dib, here we go....

And he stood up and stretched again and then stopped. What information, precisely, did he have?

***

Megan was driving, Jim sitting beside her, not trusting himself in the back with Bugg. Bugg refused to tell them where they were going, but directed Megan with a careless "left here" "right at the lights", as if he were giving orders to a servant.

"Well?"

"In time, detective"

"When?"

No answer.

"Sandburg had better be alive when we get to him..."

Bugg sat upright and opened his eyes wide.

"Did you really think we were going to pick him up? Come now, Detective. You know better than that. I gave you a chance to have him released and you threw it back in my face. I’m afraid you’re going to have to live with the fact..."

Something was wrong. Something in the...

...air...

...choking...

...thick, acrid smoke, pumping from the little gas grenade in Bugg’s hand. Where from? God, the lawyer must have slipped it to him, along with the inhaler device he was strapping over his own face, and it was no good, Megan was already slumped onto the dash, the car cruising to a gentle halt on the sidewalk, the horn blaring...

As his sight dimmed, the last sense to depart was hearing, as Jim distinctly heard Bugg’s last line...

"The fact that you killed your best friend."

***

"Rhonda!"

She put her coffee ruefully back down onto her desk. This was the fourth cup she’d made herself in as many hours and she hadn’t managed to drink more than a mouthful of any before something else happened.

"Get onto the PA system and find out if there’s anyone in the building who knows semaphore. Hell, get on the phone and find me a boy scout, dammit!"

"Semaphore?"

"Semaphore. Signalling with flags, or at least with the shape of your arms. Either Sandburg’s doing some obscure Swedish keep fit exercises or he’s trying to signal us and if I don’t find someone who can read semaphore in the next five minutes...."

"Five years as a girl scout had to come in useful some day - Simon, step aside."

The men of Major Crimes watched breathlessly as Rhonda started to scribble down letters W.A.R.E.H.O.U.S.E. x B.Y. x R.A.I.L.R.O.A.D. x L.I.N.E. x B.R.E.A.K. x L.E.G.x A.T. x F.I.V.E.

Simon looked at the clock.

"Gentlemen, we have ninety minutes. The radio station he’s been listening to is in Seattle. He’s in a warehouse by a railroad track. Find him."

Four

"Yes, Captain; one of my men."

Interdepartmental rivalry was complicated enough. Keep it simple, Simon thought, not ready to waste Sandburg’s time trying to convince the Seattle P.D. that a ride-along anthropologist counted as a brother officer. Sandburg was just... Sandburg. A special case. One of their own, whichever way you cut it.

"Well, if that’s the best you can do..."

Budgets were king everywhere. Simon kept a tight rein on his temper and smiled a gruesome smile. Well, they said on that course on communication skills that the smile would travel but the insincerity wouldn’t.

"But I take it you have no objection if a few of my own men help you out - strictly on their own time, of course..."

He put down the phone and looked up at an expectant ring of faces. "What, no-one has anything to do? OK, listen up: the Seattle PD are going to get a couple of pairs of uniforms to make a sweep of warehouses by railroad lines. They figure there are around twenty-five, thirty warehouses in their area that would fit the description. I know it’s not much, but it’s the best we can hope for by way of inter-departmental co-operation. The good news is, they have no objection to arresting our bad guys for us if we can find them. Rhonda, get a car organised... Rhonda?"

"Still on webcam-watch Sir. Sandburg is trying to get some sleep but she wants to be there until we find another semaphore-reader, just in case."

"Good thinking. Henri, you can organise the transportation. We're going to Seattle, people."

***

"Wha-?"

Watching Megan wake up was an interesting experience; from bleary-eyed to homicidal in two seconds flat. She hurled herself at the chains before she was awake enough to properly assess her position.

"Whoa tiger," Jim said carefully "You're going to break my wrist if you're not careful."

She stopped thrashing and froze, wide-eyed.

"What the-"

Jim grinned companionably at her and let her make her own assessment of their situation. They were still in the car, still in the front seats, but they were in semi darkness, the car parked in something like an underground garage, a wall on one side preventing Jim opening his door, and on the other side a van that was parked half an inch away blocking in Megan. Oh, yeah, and they were handcuffed together, using Jim’s own cuffs, with the cuffs looped through the steering wheel. And the radio was wrecked and their cell phones left on the trunk - outside the back window, and so way out of reach.

"Look on the bright side," Jim said cheerfully, "he left us our weapons."

"Ah. Right." Megan said sardonically, "So if the tedium gets too much we can always shoot each other. OK, give, mate - why are you so damned calm?"

"Paperwork," Jim said briefly. He gestured towards the paperwork they had had to complete before signing Bugg out of the station... held together by a paperclip. Megan grinned broadly as she watched him untwist the useful piece of metal and focus on the handcuffs’ lock.

"So, I’m supposed to do Sandy’s job and help you stay with it?" Jim ignored her; or didn’t hear. She carried on regardless. "I guess I’ll keep talking then? Jim? You’re still awake, yes? Sheesh. How does Sandy stand you? Listen, Jim, I’ve been thinking. About Sandy."

This won her a grunt of acknowledgement.

"Or about Bugg, really. There’s something... off... about this whole thing."

Silence. But he was still working patiently at the lock so she refrained from kicking him and carried on talking.

"The Mohs thing. If Bugg really wanted to blackmail you into working for him, there would have been something at the Mohs factory, or somewhere on the estate, that would have clued us in to what he wanted you to do. And I was wondering about the name. It was nagging me, in the back of my head, that I’d heard it before somewhere. I looked it up on the internet and it’s a scientific scale for gauging the hardness of metals, especially abrasives. And then I remembered; have you ever read Modesty Blaise?"

Silence.

"Female superhero? Hell, the book covers look horrible - some semi-naked bimbo, I always cover them up with something else - but they’re a secret vice of mine. She’s a really good character; a strong, kick-ass woman... anyway, in one of the books there’s a character who’s undercover in some gang and they put him through what they call a Mohs test - a test for hardness. And it got me wondering. What if I couldn’t find anything at Mohs because there isn’t anything there to find? What Bugg is doing isn’t blackmailing you, it’s testing you."

The lock fell open and Jim looked up at her, and it was as if she was looking at something not human at all, his eyes completely black, his pupils opened so wide there was no blue to be seen.

"So why did he go through all that rigmarole? What about the ‘five stage markers’ that the kidnappers are looking for?"

"Jim, I don’t know, I’m just theorising, all right? But if I’m right, then there wasn’t anything you could have done that would have stopped this happening to Sandy. You know that, right? None of this is your fault?"

Jim busied himself with hotwiring the car. Megan sighed and put the engine into reverse.

***

"Come here."

No more "Mr Sandburg." Not a good sign.

They twisted his arm, pushed up his sleeve.

"What’s that for? Ouch! Dammit, what IS that?"

"Just go to sleep for a while, OK. We’ll still be here when you wake up."

He made it to the futon, just, before the darkness claimed him.

***

"Sir?"

Simon heard the urgency in Rhonda’s voice and turned, still buckling his bullet proof vest, to check in with her before leaving for Seattle with Henri and the others.

"What’s happening?"

Rhonda had taken over the Blairwatch full time now.

"I don’t know, not exactly, but a minute ago they grabbed his arm and injected him with something and now he seems to be unconscious. Then they moved two of the cameras and they seem to be re-positioning the third one now. And there was a fork lift, a moment ago, moving some boxes around.

It was Henri Brown, looking over Rhonda’s shoulder, who supplied them with the answer.

"They know. They know the Seattle PD are checking warehouses and they’re camouflaging him. Couple guys trucking crates around, no sound from Sandburg, no spotlights - a uniform sticks his head round the door, sees people shifting gear in a warehouse, what are they going to do?

"They know," Simon agreed, "and we just lost our edge."

Rhonda looked up from the screen.

"How do they know?"

***

Simon’s cavalry was on its way, Jim and Megan were off somewhere with Bugg, Rhonda was on Blairwatch still, and Joel Taggart was left behind, in charge, co-ordinating the operation.

"Joel?"

"Rafe? What have you got?"

"Where is everyone?"

Of course - Rafe and Serena had been hard at work since Bugg had first been brought in, trying to track down the ISP the kidnappers were using in the hope they could get a trace on where Blair was being held that way. Taggart quickly brought them up to speed and then looked at their crestfallen faces.

"So it doesn’t matter where the ISP is? We know where to find Sandburg?"

"It matters, Rafe; we haven’t found the kid yet. What have you got?"

"The weirdest thing Joel - it’s a website that belongs to some Englishwoman, works for the British government or the IRS or whatever; nothing to do with Sandburg at all. I know a guy who knows a guy in London and he put me on to a guy over there who checked her out and she’s clean. He even visited her house. She was horrified when she saw what was on her site - last time she looked it was a couple of pages of stories she’d written or something."

"So there’s no connection? Nothing to do with Sandburg at all? They just overwrote her site - hacked in?"

"Looks like it. Joel, I just don’t get it."

"Joel!" Rhonda’s voice, sharp, urgent...

The screen was blank.

"What happened?"

Serena grabbed for the next workstation, started typing furiously. Another blank screen appeared, serene, blue, blank, terrifying.

"I don’t know - one minute I was looking at Blair sleeping, half listening to you talking about the ISP; the next, I’m looking at a blue screen.

Not quite a blue screen. Now there was a text box, scrolling majestically up and down:

"To continue your viewing pleasure

enter PIN no now.....

New viewers call for PIN. All major credit cards accepted."

That, and a phone number.

Joel was already reaching for the dial.

***

It wasn’t dark, not exactly. More gloomy. Sinister. His mind insisted on supplying him with helpful adjectives. Morbid. Shut up! He stood up, carefully, stretching out, checking if there had been any further damage done to him while he was out of it. Nothing so far. If they were going to break his leg, they hadn’t thought to do it whilst he was mercifully anaesthetised. Of course, they didn’t want him mercifully anaesthetised - they wanted him live and wriggling and putting on a good show of howling and screaming for the folks back home.

He suddenly went cold. Shock. Never mind that they were threatening to up the ante by breaking his leg any minute now, he went cold at the sudden realisation that, with a webcam on him, the entire bullpen must have seen him prancing about trying to keep warm. Ohmigod what if someone had made it public, in the precinct or at the U? He was going to be followed by footage of himself larking about to YMCA for the rest of his life. He might as well give up and grow a moustache right now. Dammit, now he needed to pee, and he really didn’t feel the same way about the bucket and the lid now that he knew that everyone with access to the internet was capable of watching him.

Well, they could watch him pee in a bucket now or they could watch him piss himself later: probably at the moment someone came to break his leg. He took care of business and then looked intelligently at the revised set-up. Nothing much had changed, he was still in the same place, caged and watched, but the cage had been walled in by wooden crates on three sides, the spotlights and the webcams moved and adjusted so they wouldn’t be visible over the wall of crates....

Damn, he realised, someone must have been searching. If it wasn’t Jim, if they only took a cursory glance into the warehouse... and if he had been unconscious when they did it... they could have searched the building and not have found him.

Hmm. His desperate semaphore must have been read and acted on, but he had been kidnapped first thing in the morning and it had been coming towards dusk when he had first woken up here, wherever here was - so "here" could, theoretically, be almost anywhere. So he could be across a state line, hell, he could be in Canada for all he knew, and maybe all Jim and Simon had been able to do was ask for a drive-by of warehouses by railroads.

And he had been unconscious and out of sight when they looked, and he hadn’t been found. Scratch that plan, then. He was going to have to find a way of signalling where he was that couldn’t be disguised. If only he actually KNEW where he was, that would be a damned fine plan.

***

There wasn’t a human being involved, that much was clear. Just another set of automated menus. Joel navigated through, pressing buttons, entering his credit card details and having them verified, and was finally rewarded by the electronic voice reciting a pin number which he carefully wrote down and handed to Serena. She typed it into the computer... and there was Blair, still looking OK, as if nothing had happened.

Serena typed.

"What’s happening?"

Rafe shushed him. "Don’t interrupt her while she’s working," he said, smiling, having been taught this elementary fact of life via a painful kick in the shins at the start of their working together on this project. The two men watched in awe as Serena brought up a box of text next to the pictures of Sandburg and scrolled quickly through it.

"I don’t believe it. Dammit, guys, we have GOT to find these bozos."

"What?"

"They’ve done it. Must be a dongle or something... that’s how I’d do it. Yeah, that would work. Plug it into the back of the machine, grind it under your heel when you bug out - we’d never find them."

"SERENA! Stop talking to yourself and tell us what you’ve got."

"OK, imagine I’m a... pornographer, say. Or a paedophile. Or I’m organising illegal bareknuckle fights. God, bear-baiting or cock-fighting for all I know. I’m a criminal, right? Organising something illegal, that other lowlifes will pay to see?"

"Yeah..."

"Well I could broadcast it on the web, but up till now the authorities have always been able to do what Rafe and I have been trying to do today - track down the internet service provider, get a court order to get them to release their records, which gives you at least an address, or a credit card number or something, some way of following the chain further..."

"And this is different?"

"Hell, yes... these people aren’t using an ISP, or at least not an ISP of their own. They’ve found a way of breaking into other people’s sites, of overwriting someone’s poetry page, or recipes, or pictures of their cat or whatever, with their webcam footage. But, anyone could do that, so how does that help my criminal? Well, they’ve got something that enables them to get their money and switch the footage from site to site... it’ll be a piece of software, not hardware, but they’ll probably put it into a piece of hardware called a dongle so they can sell it. Your bad guy buys it, plugs it into the back of his machine, and there you are! His website can be anywhere, can take over anyone’s site... and his customers are directed to it once they fork out their cash into this automated system... which, I bet you, is nothing but a bank of tape recorders offshore somewhere... and in return for their cash they get a pin number and once they’ve fed in the pin the programme takes them with it from site to site. If the authorities find and close down one hack they just skip with it to another..."

She looked at them, trying to will them to understand.

"Don’t you get it? If you’re a kidnapper, how do you get caught? At the point of contact. If you’re a pornographer, how do you get caught? At the point of contact. Same for the fight promoter or the animal torturer... and these guys have found a way to cut off the point of contact and still get their money. If this genie gets out of the bottle, there’ll be no putting it back..."

Five

"OK, Sandburg, on your feet: it’s showtime!"

Hostage 201. When they start working up their hostility levels it’s because something really bad is going to happen. It’s at this point that you have to decide what you’re going to do. If you stick with meek and mild, obedient and tractable, maybe the situation won’t escalate... but it’s a thin maybe. If you fight back, maybe you’ll get hurt worse... but if you’re going to get hurt anyway...

Showtime it is, then. But there were still five of them and only one of him, so he needed to even the odds a little. He stayed with meek and mild, just for now, waited for them to open the cage door...

He kneed the first one in the groin and then bounced him back from the doorway with a strike of the heel of his hand against the man’s chin. One. He was able to duck the second one’s punch, since it was constrained by the cage door, and used his full weight to "fall" sideways onto the outstretched arm, slamming it against the edge of the doorframe, in the hope he might break one of their limbs first.

Two was a good score, he thought vaguely, wondering why he was on the floor. Someone must have hooked his feet out from under him and it was all over except for the really bad part yet but why couldn’t he move his arms and oh god Jim now would be a good time now now now, please, now...

***

Rhonda was crying frankly, openly, and Joel turned her around and closed Simon’s door behind them.

"I can’t watch," she said.

"I know."

"But someone should... be with him..."

"I know. I’ll do it. Stay here. It’ll be OK."

Sandburg had the right idea, he thought. If he was going to try and fight them, then the doorway of the cage was the place to do it, cut down on the advantage their numbers gave them. And he’d got a couple of good blows in, too, before they got him down. But now they’d cuffed his wrists again and stretched him out on his back on the ground and two of them were holding his legs, another one holding his head. They had two blocks of wood, little things, about the size of a cellphone, that they put under his ankle and his calf. Then they checked the cameras carefully, made sure there was a really good view being broadcast, that one of the cameras was focused on a tight shot of the stretched out piece of shin that was their target...

One of them had a hammer. Ski-mask showed it to the camera, carefully, tried to show it to Sandburg but Blair had his eyes firmly shut, breathing deep. Doing some of those deep-breathing meditation exercises, Joel guessed, hoping it would help.

And then ski-mask raised the hammer.

Rhonda was right, Joel thought, detached. There was a sick fascination in what they were doing, kind of like the feeling you get when you’re a kid and you peel the scab off a wound on your knee. Gruesome and sickening and yet fascinating, all at once.

But Rhonda still had the right of it. He couldn’t, he found, however much he felt he ought to, watch the actual moment when the hammer fell.

***

"No."

"Yes."

"No. Jim, you are the worst driver I know. I’m faster, I’m calmer, I’m just plain better than you, even now when I’m driving on adrenaline and anger. Whereas you, you are a pissed-off Sentinel with as bad a case of Blessed Protector Syndrome as I’ve ever seen and if I let you drive we’ll both be dead when the car’s wrecked and Simon will, personally, kill me again for misuse of departmental property and then jump up and down on my ashes."

"Connor..."

She flashed him a wicked grin.

"Don’t growl at me, mate; do I look like I care? And how long would it take you to wrestle me to a stop and make me get out of the driver’s seat? Live with it. I’m driving."

Silence.

"Besides, if I’m driving, you can concentrate on finding Sandy."

Jim had got out to pick up the cellphones and catch up with what was happening and it had been Megan who had handbrake-turned them out of the garage and gunned the car towards Seattle.

"How?"

"You know. ‘Reach out with your feelings’ or whatever it is that you do. He’s your Guide, Jim; you must have some sense of whereabouts he is."

She drove for a few more seconds, worried she’d finally pushed the man too far, before she recognised that muffled noise as the sound of Jim’s laughter.

"Connor, what the hell do you think I am? Spiderman? Yoda? I don’t have any more idea than you do of where Sandburg is. Hell, I thought he was still in Cascade till I spoke to Joel."

He buried his face in his hands, still laughing, and fought himself back under control. She smiled at him cautiously, sympathetically. That last laugh had sounded suspiciously like a sob.

"Yeah, I’m worried too, Jim. But we’ll find him."

"Shut up."

"Charmed."

"Seriously. Pull over."

"What?"

"CONNOR, PULL THIS FUCKING CAR OVER RIGHT NOW AND SIT QUIETLY FOR A SECOND."

She watched him, warily. This wasn’t in any of Sandy’s notes. He prowled the car like a cat looking for the mouse in the cellar.

"Jim-"

He held up a hand and she subsided. His eyes were large and black again, and he was doing the Sentinel thing, again.

There. He, well, pounced was the word. And then held up a piece of pink plastic the size of the head of a pin. And crushed it between his fingers.

"Bugg bugged us."

"How did you..."

"Either move over or drive, Connor. I want to get to Seattle."

***

He couldn’t seem to stop shaking. His leg hurt, sure, but it was a weird sort of hurt, somewhere else, as if neither the leg nor the pain was quite attached to his body. He was so cold. Why was it always so cold in these places? Why did no-one ever kidnap him and lock him up in a sauna? He was shaking with cold, that was it. Nothing to do with shock, or pain, or fear, or the sheer, gut-churning, outrageous fury that anyone would dare to do this to him, to anyone. He opened a bottle of water, awkward with cuffed hands. Spilled half of it, managed to get some into his mouth instead of down his shirt. Of course now that he actually wanted a cup of tea, they’d stopped being super-polite and offering it to him. And taking off the cuffs wouldn’t have killed them. He laughed at his own wit. After all, where was he going to go?

Next time, they were going to rape him. Not much longer, they’d said. Jim was failing the test, hadn’t even got near to finding him. So they would come back and each of them would... and then in a few hours he’d be dead and it would all be over.

So what was his next move?

He looked around his cage hopelessly. Not even the A Team could have built anything useful out of a packet of taco chips and a bucket of piss.

Although...

...actually...

...if he could get them to give him the handcuff key...

"HEY!!! KIDNAPPERS? HELLO??? Hows about some tea? And the key to these things, huh?"

***

It would be twenty minutes before they were anywhere near Seattle. Jim slumped down in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. Did he really have any "spider sense" of whereabouts Blair might be?

Two minutes was enough to answer that one. No. So what was he going to do? Twenty warehouses lining the railroad tracks. It would take them a long time to search them all. Would he be able to hear Blair? Tune into his voice amongst a cacophony of other voices? He had to. That was what being a Sentinel was for, surely, or else what was the point?

He tried to rest, to switch off. It must be, what, forty eight hours since Blair was taken, thirty six hours since Bugg had broken into the loft...

Yes, Megan was right, he realised. There WAS something screwy about this. The first time, Bugg’s demands had been simple. Do this or else I’ll do that. There hadn’t been any chance to resist, or even any time to think, and in the end it had been sheer good luck - and a good dose of Sandburg ingenuity - that had gotten them out of the mess they were in.

But this time... if Bugg didn’t want Jim to do something, why parade around asking to be arrested?

The sensation of the pink plastic bug snapping under his fingers came back to him, a vivid sense-memory, as if he had another one to break under his hand. Simple. Bugg had let Jim arrest him because he wanted to be arrested. He had let Jim sign him out of the precinct because he wanted to bug the car. He was an industrial spy; deals to cut, money to make. And he had wanted to be arrested for the same reason that he wanted to be driven around by Jim.

Bugg. Bugg bugg bugg bugg bugg. Dammit, he had done it again, bugged Jim, bugged the car, bugged the precinct. They had all seen it, and hadn’t put it together. The barrier of crates around the cage - because Bugg had bugged the station and let the kidnappers know the Seattle PD would be coming by. The security pop-up on the webcam site - because Bugg had bugged the bullpen and so they’d heard their first ISP cut-off had been penetrated. And the bug in the car, so that he could keep track of how close the Sentinel was to retrieving his Guide. Damn but Connor had been right all along.

He sneaked a sideways look at her, leaning forward, intent on her driving. Of course, it would be a kindness NOT to tell her that she had been right all along, not when it might interrupt her concentration while she was driving...

***

Six

"I don’t get it, what is he doing?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, Joel. All I know is that he filled his pockets with taco chips and now he’s trying to get up onto his feet."

"With a broken leg?"

"With a broken leg. You know Blair."

"The kid’s got guts, Rhonda, you have to give him that."

"But it’s all going to be for nothing, in the end," Serena added mournfully. They were, the four of them, Joel, Rhonda, Serena and Rafe, off the clock but still hanging in there at the bullpen, unwilling to go home until they had seen the saga through to the end. Whatever was going to happen, whether Simon and the others, or Jim and Megan, found Blair in time, or not, was going to happen soon. And they would have a live webcam feed. Would it be too gross, Joel thought to himself, to get popcorn?

"Serena, what are you saying?" Rhonda demanded.

"Well, it’s nothing personal. That’s what I’ve been saying all along. It’s nothing to do with Jim and Blair themselves. They’re just... testing. Live testing the dongle. Seeing if the police can find them, and making sure we’re properly motivated for the search by snatching one of our own."

They knew all about the bugs: Jim’s cellphone had been busy and they had found the little pink plastic pieces scattered throughout the precinct; the loft was being swept by Serena’s staff even as they spoke.

"Think about it," Rafe said sadly, "if it hadn’t have been for the accident of the radio we’d have no idea where Blair was. And if it hadn’t have been for the accident of Sandburg knowing semaphore we’d have no way of narrowing down the search even if we did. The dongle - or whatever you call it - works just fine. It’s only a matter of time before Jim finds Blair - but whether it’ll be in time to save him, or not, is up to the fates."

"I don’t believe that," Joel Taggart said quietly, "because Jim isn’t going to let anything happen to Blair... anything permanent," he corrected himself quickly, watching Blair’s painful struggle to get to his feet. "And now that Jim knows what’s at stake - not just Blair’s life but all the lives that would be threatened if this.. thing... they’re testing ever got to market, well, he’ll be there."

"He has to be," Rhonda breathed.

Amen to that, three people thought sincerely.

***

End of the line, he thought. He’d made it to his feet. Foot, anyway, he couldn’t put weight on the other one. His weapons were to hand, such as they were. All he could do now, was try and hold off the inevitable for as long as he could.

And pray the cavalry would arrive in time.

Of course, he had a few ideas about helping them along...

He balanced carefully and then raised his hands for one last semaphore message.

T.E.L.L. x J.I.M. x F.O.L.L.O.W. x Y.O.U.R. x N.O.S.E.x

And started to laugh, hysterically, letting out all the fear and pain and leaving behind only determination, to hold on, to endure, as long as he could.

***

"Morrison, Seattle PD."

"Ellison, Cascade. What have you got?"

"We had a couple of uniforms drive by the warehouse district but they didn’t find anything suspicious and we don’t have the manpower, frankly, to do a proper search. Your captain said you’d be able to narrow it down and, if you do, we’ll be here in five to make the arrest. Best I can do, I’m afraid."

Morrison, Megan and Jim bent over the maps Morrison had provided and began to trace out a path that would let them drive by each of the possible warehouses for themselves.

***

"Well, Sandburg, this is it. You ready for us?"

He said nothing, balanced on his good foot, in the exact centre of the cage. "What, nothing to say? You’ve been noisy enough so far. What happened? Cat got your tongue?"

They unlocked the cage door and he tensed.

They pushed...

...and the handcuffs, discarded deceptively on the ground but actually clasped around the door jamb and the door itself, did their job. Blair might not be able to get out, but they they couldn’t get in either.

They rattled the bars and shook at the cage door, infuriated, and then one of them started kicking at the door. It rattled, but the cuffs held.

Of course one of them, sadly, actually *had* a brain, and went off to fetch the spare keys...

***

"The kid’s a genius!"

"Hey, Joel, tell us something new!" Rafe and Serena were hugging each other and Rhonda’s eyes were suspiciously bright.

"Get Jim on the phone. He still has time. Not much, but some."

***

Megan drove slowly.

"Anything?"

"Shh."

Confusion of noise: voices, heartbeats, machinery. A radio blaring. An office copier, phones.

Simon and Henri’s team had started, methodically, slowly, from the north, working their way along the railroad tracks. But it was clearly going to take hours to search, even cursorily, all of the twenty or thirty warehouses within hearing distance of the tracks. Their best chance was Jim, but only Jim, Simon and Megan knew that. For everyone else they stuck to the story that, while Simon’s team worked north/south, Jim and Megan would work south/north.

"Follow your nose," Megan muttered. "What did Sandy mean by that?"

"I’m not smelling anything out of place; it could be anything and nothing. But why didn’t Sandburg semaphore WHAT I was supposed to smell?"

"Trying to keep your secret identity a secret, Spidey?" she teased, and was rewarded by a brief smile.

And then he opened the car window again, shook his head and cleared his sinuses, and they were off again.

***

"All right, stand clear." The ski-mask held up the other key to the cuffs and jingled it tauntingly at the man in the cage. Blair held up the key they had given him earlier and taunted right back: "What, you were looking for these?"

And threw the keys, as far as he could, over the wall of crates.

As their eyes turned to follow the keys’ trajectory Blair calmly leaned down, picked up the slop bucket - and hurled its contents in a broad arc that drenched each of the five kidnappers from head to foot.

***

"Way to go Sandburg!"

High fives all round.

"Follow your nose? Hah! I bet we could smell those guys from Cascade!"

The word "cascade" suddenly seemed to Rafe hysterically funny and he clutched onto Serena to prevent himself sliding off his chair altogether.

"What?"

"Cas...cas...cascade!"

And then Rhonda saw it too, and Serena; and Joel Taggart found himself in charge of three lunatic hyenas.

***

Well, he had made them mad. Really, deeply, raging-incoherently mad. Which was something, when you came to think about it. But they still hadn’t managed to open the cage, because the lock was stuffed full of the raisins he’d busily tamped in there while he was lying on the floor and shivering, earlier.

But they were using their brains, now, and patiently worrying away at the gunk in the lock of the cuffs and, really, it was only a matter of time...

***

"What?"

"Something..."

He turned like a flower towards the sun... and then recoiled, shaking his head and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Dial it down, Jim, whatever it is. I haven’t got time to practice bringing you out of one of those zone thingies just now."

"No, stop. Here. We’re nearby. Which way is the wind blowing..."

He got out of the car and, cautiously, sniffed the air once more.

"What are you smelling?"

He grinned at her.

"Trust me, Connor, you really don’t want to know. That way."

She looked. "That way" there were only two warehouses. They were getting close...

***

One of them had snuck up behind him, grabbed him by the neck through the bars, held him fast.

"Come on, open it up. Blair’s dying to party, isn’t that right?"

And Blair’s hand went into his pocket and came out with a handful of powder which he hurled into the man’s face, his eyes. An eye-watering powder composed of ground up nacho chips, all hard edged gritty particles and chili peppers that burned like acid. The kidnapper howled in anguish and Blair broke free, yelling in triumph.

And then, having nothing to lose, he yelled some more.

"HOW’D YOU LIKE THAT, ASSHOLE? WANT SOME MORE? BRING IT ON!!! I’VE GOT PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM."

Well, it seemed both more assertive and more plausible than yelling what he was really thinking. Which was "Jim! Help!!"

***

"Call Simon and the others, and Morrison. This is the one."

He thrust the cellphone into her hand and was gone.

"Jim!"

But there was no point arguing. She raised the cellphone and hit speed dial.

***

"Ten bucks says Jim makes it."

"Rafe!"

"What? What did I say?"

"I agree with Rhonda. Rafe, it’s not a nice thing to take bets on."

Rafe looked hurt, and then looked to Taggart for masculine back-up against the female onslaught. Joel, having more sense, raised a "you’re on your own, kid," hand in warning and said nothing.

"It’s not a, not a BET. Not really. Not in that sense. It’s more a kind of an... expression. An expression of support. I can make jokes about it because, in my heart, I’m certain Jim WILL make it in time..."

Good catch, thought Taggart sardonically.

***

"Freeze! Cascade PD!"

"Yesssss! WHAT DID I TELL YOU, ASSHOLES!!! YOU ARE SO SCREWED."

"Chief?"

"Jim?"

"Shut up a minute."

"Ah. Shutting up now."

Because he still was immobilised, pinned in the circle of light by the cage and the broken leg. And there were still five of them, and they had guns, and they were kind of pointing them at him. Well, dammit, Jim was here now, which meant he was saved, wasn’t he? It always meant he was saved.

"Give it up, Ellison. You’re here on your own, with no backup, just like our employer predicted. So lose the weapon, and you and curly can get in some quality time in the cage together while we get out of here."

Megan snapped the dongle out of the back of the computer as she stepped into the circle of light.

"I think you might be a little premature, gentlemen, in your analysis."

"Thank you, Inspector," Simon’s voice came reassuringly from the shadows, "and I do believe you are right."

They gave up their weapons, and Jim used his Sentinel sight to fix yet another set of handcuffs and open the cage door.

"Hey, Jim," Blair said nonchalantly, "is that all for now? Only I think I’m ready to pass out, if that’s OK..."

"Yeah, buddy, that’s OK." And Jim gently lowered his unconscious friend to the floor. After all, what are Blessed Protectors for?


End file.
